If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You will be required to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Lifetime Warranty?

02-25-2006, 08:45 AM

I was checking out Home Depot's website and found info on Ridgid's Lifetime Warranty on power tools. It says in the info that the offer starts April 15th 2005 and runs for a limited time. So does Ridgid still offer the lifetime warranty at this time?

At one time they offered a lifetime warranty. Now you get a 3 year warranty with a free Lifetime Service Agreement if you register your tools and send in a copy of the receipt and the original UPC code from the box.

I don't know what it is, but I'm sure there is a difference between a lifetime warranty and the Lifetime Service Agreement. For one thing, you do have to go through the registration process, and the service agreement is tied to whoever registers the tool. There are probably other legal implications from the different wording based on state laws.

Take a look at this thread (and do some other searches using "lifetime" "warranty" and "service agreement"):

If you read some other threads, you'll find complaints about the lifetime warranties and service agreements. Having read some of them, the only legitimate complaints I found involved too-lengthy repair times.

A lot of people seem upset that you can't bring a broken Ridgid tool into Home Depot for an immediate free replacement, but that is not what the warranty/service agreement entitles you to. This is not, by any stretch, the unlimited, unconditional "Guaranteed Forever" warranty offered by Sears on their Craftsman hand tools (but not Craftsman power tools).

On a separate note, it seems a lot of members here will not respond to questions that they feel are addressed in previous threads, feeling that new members should use the search tool to find them (which makes sense).

To search effectively, you need to know some abbreviations that may not be so obvious at first (like ZCI for zero clearance insert). But you also need to know that the search engine here is limited in ways I have not encountered before. For instance, if you search "ZCI" and another word (or ZCI alone), the search engine will dump ZCI as too short to be searched for.